Indiana communities to join roundtable on climate change

Climate change is not just about whether polar bears have enough ice to live on. If it were, Kokomo wouldn’t have a direct interest in the topic.

But the issue matters to Kokomo — and to communities of all sizes across Indiana and the country.

Kokomo Mayor Greg Goodnight will attend Thursday’s roundtable discussion in Carmel that is part of the fact-finding of President Barack Obama’s Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience.

Carmel Mayor Jim Brainard, a Republican, was asked to join the task force and has organized today’s discussion. The task force is to develop a draft report in six months and hand in a final report of recommendations or conclusions in a year.

Brainard said he has asked local government representatives, energy and environmental experts, business representatives and academics to participate in Thursday’s session. The roundtable discussion is not open to the public or the media, but Brainard and White House participants plan a news conference after the meeting, which will focus on input from those invited.

“I want to hear what they think we ought to be paying attention to,” Brainard said.

Goodnight has been invited to listen to the discussion from an audience seat but won’t be part of the panel. Climate change is a local and global issue, he said, and not an either-or proposition.

“Our summers are hotter, our droughts are worse, our extreme weather is getting more extreme,” Goodnight said. Floods also are getting worse, the mayor said, noting that the Kokomo area experienced a 100-year flood last year, just 10 years after surviving a 50-year flood.

Communities closer to oceans are confronting their own climate change-related challenges, and no one community has the solution to all the problems, Goodnight said.

“Even if these things are not a direct responsibility of local government in the state of Indiana,” he said, “we should all be aware of the issues.”

William Brown, director of sustainability at Indiana University in Bloomington, will be a participant at Thursday’s meeting. Also an adjunct professor at IU, Brown teaches a graduate-level class on “sustainable communities,” delving precisely into such issues.

The power is in a collective, coordinated response, he said, and that depends partly on collective understanding of the issues.

“If you just do it in one community, you’re not going to have much of an impact,” Brown said. “But if you have thousands of communities responding, you will.”

Brown comes at the issue from a science background and thinks human activities are connected to climate change. He hopes people will understand the science behind the problems and solutions.

But answering the question “Why is this happening?” isn’t necessary to forming responses to what is happening, Brown said.

That’s where Marion Mayor Wayne Seybold comes down, too. Seybold was not asked to join Thursday’s roundtable, but he is paying attention to the climate change debate, solutions being offered — and how they might affect Marion.

“The climate is changing,” he said. “Whether that’s because of global warming or some kind of natural progression, whatever it is, the climate is changing.”

For Marion, that means more debris for the city to pick up after storms, more snow to plow some winters, droughts in some summers and floods in others. His city has to deal with those issues, Seybold said.

He is keenly interested in what, if anything, the federal government recommends or requires of local governments, because that likely will affect his budget.

Those kinds of actions have to make sense from financial as well as environmental standpoints, Seybold said.

For example, the quantity and quality of available water might increasingly become a a problem for some communities, and Marion happens to sit atop a plentiful and clean underground water source, the mayor said.

“For us, it might be a question of: ‘How do we market that?’ ” he said.

Many questions are likely to confront local communities, and efforts such as the president’s Task Force can help local communities share wisdom and come up with solutions that likely will require fundamental changes, Seybold said.

“In the next 10, 15, 20 years, I think we’re going to see some major shifts.”